Last year I was on about 10 social networks, this year the number has gone up to 17 (which is  really19 as I excluded Google Reader and WordPress.com for visual purposes). But it seems to me that interconnectivity has still not matured enough, there is no “home” for your social networks, and I doubt this will change in the short term.

Click on the image to see a full-sized version.

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Otherwise, I have a story to tell you…

Once upon a time I was just like you. I had many ideas, some of them quite good, and I tried to carry them out only to realise I couldn’t finish all of them. Sometimes I would get bored halfway through and leave the project incomplete. When it was something socially-related and I did not achieve an immediate response, I would leave it incomplete and/or get frustrated with it. Sometimes I simply couldn’t be arsed to continue with it.

What made matters worse was the sense of guilt I would sometimes build up after a week, a month or a few years after starting a project and not having been able to finish it. A sense of being incompetent. And the more things I left that way, the worse I felt. A constant buzz in the back of my brain telling me that I didn’t finish it, and I could have.

One example was Zyborg, a computer game (Clone of ZZT) I started developing around 10 years ago with Saxxonpike in Qbasic 4.5. We abandoned the project a few months after we started, however, I always felt a tingling sensation of having left it just standing there. I still have the code.

I also used to start (and not finish) hundreds of songs, paintings, poems, lyrics, books, ideas, scripts, computer programs, drawings and many other things. I even started a company once, and we were really motivated. But after stumbling a few times into problems, we just silently gave up on it. But the tingling sensation must have lasted ages in all of us. The sense of not having been able to accomplish our goal. The feeling of failing.

When and how did things change for me?

When I started adding a little bit of organisation into my life.

I started off by writing task lists and project ideas down on paper. If I couldn’t get through them in one go I learned not to stress about it and leave it for a later date, whenever I felt more confident or motivated about the project. Then all these ideas and tasks stopped being burdens on my mind and were converted to sentences in a notebook (later replaced by Google Docs).

Then I started printing out calendars in Microsoft Publisher, and using them to keep track of future events. I have never liked daily based diaries as I hate the format, I hate carrying too many notebooks, and I hate wasting too many blank pages. But a monthly calendar format suited me, with 30-31 rectangles on a sheet with just the right amount of space to keep track of my main tasks per day.

Further on, seeing the success this brought me in organising my life, I looked for a computer solution for my needs. I needed to be able to view it from any PC where I were at, so Microsoft Outlook was out of the question. I found comfort in Google Calendar which I have been using for over 2 years now. It was great, I could view it in any style I liked! I started out using the monthly style, however, lately I have preferred using the weekly view as I plan and use it on a daily basis.

Google Calendar, however, wasn’t the solution to my problem in storing my project ideas. One day one of my best friends introduced me to Remember the Milk. A pot of gold! Accessible from my iPod touch, updateable from anywhere, it was pure glory!

Since then, I have never had a problem remembering what I have done, what I have to do, and what are my plans and ideas for the future.

So if you have ever had one of these problems I have had, give it a try! I mean, it’s free so you have nothing to lose. And if it’s just not your cup of tea, stick around and give the net a look, there must be something ideal for you! The important thing is not giving up on projects or ideas just because you have no time for them at the moment. And if you started one, but haven’t finished it, just keep track of it and leave it for a later date. Don’t scrap it… Remember it.

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Why Google Buzz is brilliant and deadly to social media 1.0

From the moment it launched, Google Buzz generated buzz:

• OMG another social network to manage
• OMG there’s too much noise
• OMG this is so redundant

And for the early adopters, it’s exactly that and more. It’s noise. It’s clutter.

It’s brilliant.

Here’s why. Google wants the best of the best data. Remember this. They are a data company. They are a data quality company. They are algorithmic in their approaches to solving problems.

For a lot of the social media crowd, the moment Buzz turned on, our valued inboxes became insanely cluttered as we linked up all our social media sites, networks, and properties. We discovered that frankly, we didn’t want the firehose of social media in our inboxes.

We realized quickly, if we didn’t already know, that most of our “friends” are in fact valueless robots spewing garbage at us all day. On services like Twitter and Facebook, we don’t really notice because it’s bite size garbage that passed by quickly. When it piles up in the inbox, we notice. Fast.

So for the early adopters, those who keep Buzz on, we’re pruning back hard. We’re not following back. We’re dropping auto-follows. We’re down to just a handful of people, close friends, that we REALLY want in our inboxes. How many of the self-proclaimed social media gurus are you actually allowing inside your inbox, in Buzz? Exactly.

Continue reading @ Why Google Buzz is brilliant and deadly to social media 1.0 : Christopher S. Penn’s Awaken Your Superhero.

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Did you know that you can have your 140-character tweets from Twitter also cross-posted into your Facebook status, LinkedIn status and now even into your Google Buzz without doing much of anything besides letting each platform know that you would like this happen? And while that may sound convenient for you to ensure that anybody and everybody who is following you can get your information, it should come as no surprise that we’re quickly all barrelling towards an information and attention crash.

Continue reading… Removing The Noise | Six Pixels of Separation – Marketing and Communications Blog – By Mitch Joel at Twist Image.

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“Last Wednesday we could see as Apple presented their hyped-up much rumoured and awaited tabled, something that had created such an expectancy. However, it was such great this level of anticipation that the presentation was inevitable an anticlimax, as the tech world so frequently used the analogy of an over-sized iPod Touch that, what Steve Jobs essentially presented to us was a large iPod Touch.” – As stated in the Spanish blog Microsiervos.

But it’s not all about the expectation. Jobs could have made a great speech anyway, no matter the product. The actual product targets a new market segment. The product is actually great, it’s just what Jobs said, and how he said it, which disappoints me.

This part 1 of the original keynote Steve Jobs gave in 2007 where he presented a “revolutionary” device, the iPhone:

In that keynote he addressed 3 separate products combined into 1. A phone, a music player and an internet communication device. It was a great speech. He talked about all the different features incorporated into this product that would prove to be one of worldwide success. He gave live examples of the product. He talked like a pro at all times. He was delivering a new product, and he knew just how to get out there.

A week ago Steve Jobs gave a keynote in which he unveils the iPad. This is the presentation he gave:

So I would like to address parts of his speech independently, to be able to critically analise what he said. After each sentence I will give my own opinion, which by no means represents the media’s view, nor the general public’s view.

• It’s very thin - Yes, that seems to be the general concept these days. Isn’t the iPod Touch also thin?
• And you can change the background screen, the home screen, to personalise it any way you want. - If it couldn’t do that it would be a disgrace of a tablet.
• You can browse the web with it. – And shouldn’t it be able to? I mean, the iPod and iPhone can.
• It is the best browsing experience you’ve ever had. – Based on the same system built for the iPhone. If it didn’t incorporate this technology what kind of a tablet would it be?
• And you can turn an iPad any way you want, up, down, sideways. It automatically adjusts. – Yeah, motion sensors. There’s no point in making them sound “new”.
• Right there holding the internet in your hands. - Uhh?

The problem is that he presented these points as if they were brand new. When he gave the iPhone speech it was impressive, he demonstrated everything real-time, and made it all seem “cool”. Addressing the same issues the same way with just an oversized iPod is not cool.

He should have focused less on the fact that it has these standard features that the iPhone and iPod Touch already have, and more on the fact that with 3rd party add-ons, OS improvements, application and OS extensibility the tablet might make a great gadget. For what? For collaborative meetings, for adding extensibility (drawing pad anyone?) to PCs and Macs.

It is also an interesting Kindle competitor. Great for working in tight spaces which makes it good versus Netbooks. Frankly I think it is a good gadget. It would be better if it had an actual OS as an alternative, or an extensible version of the OS (apart from Apps), however, with a better focus on segmentation this device will be great.

What is your opinion on the speech and the actual device?

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So, you might have heard a lot of talk/posts going around lately referring to Google Wave. So what is this “Google Wave” everyone is talking about?

It is a beta service from Google, hosted at http://wave.google.com, which currently is only available to 100,000 people. Those people are having their invitations sent to them by Google as a preview of the service. It is expected that the service will go live in X amount of time, possibly after they have determined that the system presents a low rate of bugs, and can hold up to the excessive demand on their servers (We don’t wait it dying like Gmail, do we now?).

According to Google Wave’s short about page, a Wave is the following:

• A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
• A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
• A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

However, Wikipedia goes on to explain a little more in depth what Google Wave is:

• Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool” announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages, and numerous other extensions.

So I hope this has cleared any confusion as to what the service is, what we can expect from it, and how reliable it is going to be. We all have our fingers crossed that it will turn out to be what we expected (and that it wont fall down as much as Gmail).

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In a statement, a Microsoft representative said the company “is investigating new public claims of a possible vulnerability in IIS 5 and IIS 6 File Transfer Protocol (FTP)”.

Microsoft said it is not aware of any attacks using the vulnerability. “We will take steps to determine how customers can protect themselves, should we confirm the vulnerability.”

According to IDG News Service, code for exploiting the unpatched flaw was posted to the Milw0rm Web site. IDG said the exploit appears to affect primarily older versions of IIS — and only when the FTP function is enabled.

Once it is done with its investigation, Microsoft said, it will decide how to address the matter, which could include a security update as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday or an out-of-cycle update.

via IIS flaw under investigation by Microsoft | Tech News on ZDNet.

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“Google look out, Facebook knows the real money is in real-time search,” said respected blogger Robert Scoble.

“Google is the king of regular search. FriendFeed is the king of real-time search. This makes the coming battle over this issue much more interesting,” Mr Scoble told the BBC.

“FriendFeed is well known for having some powerful and intelligent technology that allows users to aggregate everything they do online and do it all in real time.

What does FriendFeed do?

• Friendfeed lets users bring together many of the accounts they have on social media and networking sites such as Facebook and Flickr
• Updates posted on those sites by a user and their friends are echoed on FriendFeed.
• A built in chat system lets FriendFeed users instantly comment or start a conversation about an update.
• These feeds of what friends are up to can be embedded in webpages or fed out to services such as Twitter.
• FriendFeed works with almost 60 sites including Delicious, Reddit, LinkedIn and NetVibes.

“With this acquisition, Facebook is gunning directly not only at Twitter, but at Google. This is a warning shot to those two companies,” Mr Parr told BBC News.

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Facebook in challenge to Google.

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The popular site has been subject to a so-called denial-of-service attack, according to the firm’s official blog.

Denial-of-service attacks take various forms but often involve a company’s servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.

Facebook has also said it is “looking into” possible problems with its site.

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Twitter site reopens after attack.

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